Breakthrough Listen at Parkes

Shared Risk Observations with the Breakthrough Listen Backend at the Parkes Radio Telescope

The Breakthrough Listen project is making its digital recorder backend at the
CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope available for up to 50 hours of shared-risk observations each semester.
The instrument consists of a cluster of 26 NVIDIA 1080 GPU-based servers capturing 8-bit voltage-level
data products across the full bandwidth of the Ultra-wideband receiver (0.7-4.0 GHz), and for the
21-cm multibeam receiver, across 308 MHz of bandwidth per beam (13x308 MHz dual pol).

CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope. Image credit: CSIRO/Shaun Amy

Data rates are typically tens of TB / hr but a pipeline is available to generate spectra
with adjustable frequency (> 3 Hz) and time (> us) resolutions, with possible science
applications including fast radio transients, pulsar observations, stellar flares, SETI, etc.

Observations are currently routinely conducted with the multibeam receiver, and support for the ultra-wideband receiver is forthcoming.
The Breakthrough Listen team runs dedicated observations for 25% of the time on Parkes,
typically in 11-hour long runs. The
telescope is controlled using TCS scripts. The Listen backend is launched from a simple
command line call on our head node and begins streaming the raw voltages to disk on our compute nodes.

For most Listen observations, we generate and archive filterbank files with 2% of the volume of the raw data, before
deleting the raw voltages from disk. In certain circumstances we retain the raw voltages for more
detailed analysis.

Guest observers wishing to use the Breakthrough Listen backend may choose to run their raw data through
the GPU-based spectroscopy pipeline on our hardware before transferring a few TB of reduced files offsite
over the internet. Observers who wish to retain raw voltages will need to provide their own storage solution,
and should contact us to discuss a data retention and transport plan.

Long observations should be split into runs lasting no longer than 8 hours, with at least 24 hours between
runs.

Potential users should familiarize themselves with the capabilities of the instrument by reading the
instrument description paper, Price et al. (2018), available on arXiv
and published in PASA.

Before submitting a proposal, proposers must obtain permission from
the Breakthrough Listen team at Berkeley SETI Research Center. If you are interested in proposing,
please email Danny Price (dancpr [at] berkeley.edu) and copy David MacMahon (davidm [at] berkeley.edu)
with an outline of your planned observations. MacMahon and Price should be added as co-Is to proposed
observations, to enable them to keep track of use of the instrument and to provide appropriate technical
support. Publications resulting from use of the Listen instrument are not required to include members
of the Listen team as co-authors (although they are welcome to do so as appropriate) but are requested
to cite Price et al. (2018).

The team at Berkeley will consult on proposal
preparation and data analysis. Any data acquired using the backend will be proprietary to the
proposer per the standard Parkes policies. Successful proposals will be allocated time from the Parkes general observer pool,
not from the dedicated Breakthrough time. Proposers are not required to share their data with the Listen
team, but where observations suitable for a piggyback SETI search are obtained the team would
welcome the opportunity to run their pipeline on the data at the proposer's discretion.